Radish Writing Novels & Stories

"But we're not getting any less brave, either." --- Spring comes early. The garden wakes. Fig discovers the joy of rolling in mud. Celeste discovers the joy of hosing him off. "You're creating a monster," I say. "I'm creating character." "That's the same thing." --- The residency in Portugal fills for the spring session. Writers from four continents, all of them working on projects about memory, about home, about the places we leave and the places that leave us. Celeste hosts a reading in the garden. The writers share their work. A woman from Ghana reads a poem about her grandmother's hands. A man from Chile reads an essay about exile and return. A nonbinary writer from the United States rea

I was in the garden when Kendrick called. “Well,” he said. “Well,” I said. “The Chicago woman isn’t the only one. I’ve had four messages in the last hour from people with similar responses.” He paused. “Alex, this is what your writing does when it has room to. This is what was happening under the Vera Mills stuff too but now it has a name attached and it lands differently.” “It lands the same,” I said. “It just has somewhere to go now.” “That’s exactly right.” He was quiet for a moment. “How are you feeling?”

From one question. From sixteen words and a white dress and forty miles in the dark. From the blank page and what would it look like. It looked like this. Serne writing her first true thing. Tal writing his first letter. Dessa carrying the cutting back toward Verath. The mint growing in the storage room window in Merrick. The rosemary with its new tips. The light returning. Spring coming. The roots deepening. The water rising. The record growing. The formation traveling. Always.

I'll be posting prompts for story openings based on our ongoing contests, successful outlines and designs, and if you are up for it, take it and write it out~ Come back to me with your own story and I have contracts to offer~ (well, if you already have a senior editor with GN, go to them :P Code for outline: User ID + Writing Sample ------- When she's preparing dinner for him, he's out there dating; When she's drinking with men to get a business deal for him, he is announcing to be single for the price of his stock;

And how that smile of his could shatter the hardest writer’s block with the gentleness of a whisper. Rachel closed her eyes, took a deep breath and exhaled slowly in an attempt to blow away the phantom image. She placed her fingers on the keyboard and started typing random words and jagged sentences, hoping somehow to ignite her creative fire. The writing didn’t have to be great. Hell, it didn’t even have to be good. It only had to fill the empty screen. Then, she would go back, fine-tune, edit, correct, re-edit again and again until she had the final, perfect chapter. The process would take her hours, sometimes even days, just to write three complete pages. When she was finally finished, sh